There are loads of issues with @author tags. I vote for removing them, but don't let me bully you. Can people whoe have committed (or are considering committing) please +1 or -1 removing these from our project source. Reasons why they are bad:

- @author tags easily go out of date.

- When you get to enough people touching a file, the @author list can get absurd.

- Determining when an @author tag is inserted/removed based on changing refactoring.

- Git retains a complete and precise history of contribution for attribution sake. This is easier to mine than @author tags and way more accurate.

Full disclosure : I've touched a decent amount of code in SY and never left an @author tag behind. I think the only ones you might find were added by David. :-) So I'm obviously a bit biased here.

The files when created may have an @author and later when modified need not necessarily have additional @author tags, unless extensive changes are made to the code. In an open source world, people could download code without the need for any SCM tool, a browser for example. A quick look at the source would say who authored the file and what license it carries. If the argument is to remove all @author tags, then why not the license headers too. Well I don't think that is good for open source. I feel the tradition of maintaining the license header as well as @author tag is significant for copyright purpose alone. When someone from the community contributes a file, it is worth to give him the credit via @author tag, rather than him asking his friends to dig through the git history.

I noticed before that you never added @author tag. I believed that like tags in post you never found it easy to add them